Bizarre bandwidth puzzle

Hi, friends. Today we have a fun nerd puzzle that should be a real treat for us to work on together! I recently upgraded to a 1Gbit/1Gbit connection with AT&T (thx Google), and I've been putting it through its paces as I upgrade my network to handle 1Gbit WAN-to-LAN performance.

Today we're looking at the performance of my Home Theater PC, which:

Runs Windows 10

Is connected via CAT6 to the router 3 feet away

Runs a very nice Intel NIC with hardware offloading of all sorts of TCP shit

Has a nice and smooth 2.4GHz quad core APU from 2015

Runs browser caches on RAMdisk to avoid IO weirdness on transfers

Now let me show you the performance across four different speed tests performed on freshly-installed browsers/tools.

WGET

1000Mbit WAN-to-LAN!

Firefox 47.x stable

861Mbit WAN-to-LAN (often higher, too!)

Edge 25.10586

925Mbit WAN-to-LAN

Chrome 52.x 64-bit stable

152Mbit WAN-to-LAN? What the fuuuuudge?

All of these results are repeatable. As many times as I want to click the "test" button, I can get similar performance results out of these browsers. So What the hell is Chrome doing? And why? And how can we fix it?

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Comments

AlexDeGruvenNot as tall as Bobby Tallbeer. Twilight Sparkle is overrated.MeechiganIcrontian

@Sonorous said:
Are the results the same across all devices or is it just the HTPC that is experiencing the anomalies? I don't have any actual suggestions for a solution, purely my own curiosity at this point.

HTPC is the only wired device to test with. I doubt the device is to blame given that 2:3 browsers work fine, though.

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BlackHawkBible music connoisseurThere's no place like 127.0.0.1Icrontian

There seems a bit of irony in it all. They are introducing a lot of fiber and competition for Gb Internet, yet their browser can't hang.

Another though. Are you connected to a work VPN? Although, probably moot point since it doesn't affect other browsers.
As a test of theory, while you are at work/in office do you have access to a web based download that stays on the internal network? (which may only be 10/100 so this test may also be moot) Thus you could test the download rate from a resource internally over chrome vs out on the internet?

@Ryder said:
There seems a bit of irony in it all. They are introducing a lot of fiber and competition for Gb Internet, yet their browser can't hang.

Another though. Are you connected to a work VPN? Although, probably moot point since it doesn't affect other browsers.
As a test of theory, while you are at work/in office do you have access to a web based download that stays on the internal network? (which may only be 10/100 so this test may also be moot) Thus you could test the download rate from a resource internally over chrome vs out on the internet?

I can connect to a work VPN, though the security protocols in effect on a VPN pipe are a kick in the teeth to throughput. You'd be pretty lucky to get 500Mbps WAN-to-LAN on VPN without spending an exorbitant amount on multi-core routing appliances with AES-NI or Intel QAT.

That said, I'm going to find a host capable of serving me a large file at 1Gbps to see if HTTP transfers are faster. I might be able to arrange a large "download" from within the LAN, too.

I now have whole-house wired gigabit LAN and WAN and have been able to test other Chrome installs on other PCs. Only the HTPC's installation of Chrome suffers this bizarre bandwidth deficiency. I've reinstalled Chrome many times on this PC, and have manually scrubbed all traces of it from the registry and otherwise, but the issue persists through installs. It's also not an addon problem, because even a clean install of Chrome on the HTPC manifests this issue.

A step down the road, but maybe not a step down one with an answer. Investigation continues.

I now have whole-house wired gigabit LAN and WAN and have been able to test other Chrome installs on other PCs. Only the HTPC's installation of Chrome suffers this bizarre bandwidth deficiency. I've reinstalled Chrome many times on this PC, and have manually scrubbed all traces of it from the registry and otherwise, but the issue persists through installs. It's also not an addon problem, because even a clean install of Chrome on the HTPC manifests this issue.

A step down the road, but maybe not a step down one with an answer. Investigation continues.

I'm going to say that it's just one of those weird hardware quirks that only will manifest with Chrome on that PC. Have you tried a different NIC?